Remember dubstep? No you don’t.

Of all the electronic music genres which exist in our modern landscape there are a few that manage to evoke such an immediate visceral reaction from people as dubstep somewhere in the last 10 years dubstep has acquired the meaning of being something other than a genre it’s more like a ubiquitous oral shorthand for absurdity that everyone immediately recognizes a shrieking piercing over compressed noise that’s played for about two to three seconds in adverts or youtube videos enough time for a joke to land for the youtuber to pull a silly face or

someone to celebrate a no-scope headshot before the video cuts to something else dubstep is not just a butt of a lot of

jokes dubstep literally is a joke being played only so that people will laugh

as it exists in 2021 it’s probably one of the most obnoxious tackiest and stupid genres of music i’ve

ever heard and yet it shares a name with another genre i happen to consider to be one of the

most expressive and eclectic sounds i’ve ever had the pleasure of listening to a genre which when i was 15 years old

opened my mind to the possibilities of what electronic music could be and laid the foundations for everything i’ve listened to since

a genre which no matter how hard i try continues to occupy the most important place in my memories how did it happen that

the thing i used to love so much became the thing i now most passionately hate well that is what this video is an

attempt at sorting out get ready to be haunted by the story of how changes in the system led me being musically homeless

this is why all my homies hate skrillex

when i was younger i was into b-boying and i’d sometimes get a lift to breaking sessions with another guy from the same

dance group who was 18 and had his own car that was insanely cool to me as a 15 year old we usually listen to music that

you could break to eric b and rakim freestyle fellowship wutai clan a load of old boombap style hip-hop from

the us but on this one fateful day my mate brought this mix cd of a load of

rave tunes it was mainly jungle stuff like dillinger frenetic jump up beats that kind of pummel you with all types of

percussion there was one piece of music on that mix cd which honestly had no earthly

business being there and this piece of music unbeknownst to me at the time would go on to change the course of my

adolescent years it started with a whimpering echo and cavernous rolling drums with all the

high end chopped off leaving a chasm of space in the mix before suddenly hitting me

with this

was instantly something about this track that felt completely alien to me i’d heard wobbling distorted leads on

german base before but i’d never heard them like this it was an ambling heavy-footed elephant of

a bee whose drums pounded behind the base in such a transfixing way that the whole thing became hypnotic

each time the hook came back round it was more transfixing and i felt like i was sinking deeper and deeper

into it i had goosebumps up and down my spine and i got that feeling that i now look back on as being particularly emblematic

of being a teenager stumbling upon their passion project it’s hard to explain exactly the emotions i had but basically in that

moment i was 100 certain that i would henceforth never listen to any other genre of music ever again

and for the next three years that was actually pretty accurate there’s a lot of lionizing narratives around the

importance of experiencing dubstep as god intended it to be heard deep in the rave on a massive sound

system but reality check i was a 15 year old living in the suburbs of nottingham

my experience of dubstep did not come from going to raves the few that i tried to go to i wasn’t allowed in because i

didn’t have id however i think there’s something to be said for the way that i ended up becoming completely enmeshed in the

dubstep scene anyway in spite of not being able to go to any of the raves my starting point was a

dubstep mix cd called dubstep all stars 5. i went through the track list putting the names of every artist featured on

this cd into limewire which was like a file sharing thing back in the day and limewire was so random the results

came directly from other people’s computers so you often got tunes with the wrong file names tunes that had been ripped

from vinyl and sounded like [ __ ] oftentunes which had the wrong artist names on them because people had just

cut them out of mixes and straight up guessed what they thought the artist’s name was one of the surprising advantages of

getting into dubstep a bit later on in the scene’s development like i did was that by the time i went digging there was already a massive wealth of

material to explore the stuff that immediately appealed to me was anything by koki

his tune sounded so evil like really horrible and predatory his baseline sounded like

they’ve been squeezed out of a leaky pipe and he had all these glitched out effects he used to throw you off the beat in the background

next came scream a scream at his best made tunes which i would describe as psychedelic the leads were colourful as

hell and you’d hear these dazzling melodies being shot out of a cannon at you that would then be flipped and reinterpreted as the track went on

i also soon developed a taste for mala’s deep orchestral echo chambers and basically if you’re a dubstep head

you know that mala’s music is basically the olives of the dubstep scene if anyone says they don’t like it it’s just

because their taste buds haven’t quite matured enough yet when they’re a bit older they’ll be ready to appreciate buried a boy

it’s really hard to put into words just how much of a revelation all this was to me as a 15 year old

something that happens as you get older as a music fan is that you start being able to compartmentalize everything you hear because it reminds

you of the stuff you’ve listened to before if someone plays you a footwork track you’ll immediately start comparing it to

stuff by dj rashad whenever you hear a mixtape from a new rapper you’ll straight away start thinking his flow sounds like earls or his beats

sound like playboy carties and as useful as this can be to contextualize things you’re hearing once your mind is wired like that you

lose the sense of wonderment that can only come from having no idea how a piece of music was made

from hearing something so alien that you have no way of situating in your mind other than just knowing that you love it i remember in

particular loafers remix of the bug it starts with this echoey plug and then hits you with

this i had never heard anyone spit lyrics

with a jamaican patois flow before i had never heard a bass like that either that hit like a quasi-808

this wasn’t just a case of me hearing something new it felt to me that this was a track which had

been sent from outer space because i literally couldn’t place any of the elements of the tune in my mind

with anything i’d ever heard before and yet i loved every bit of it so intensely i

eventually stumbled upon the rinse mix cd series and by extension rinse fm a pirate radio station where i could

hear dubstep djs playing all their new [ __ ] every week i think it was when i started listening to screams show on

rinse stella sessions the dubstep stopped feeling like a hobby and became something more like a way of

life for me scream was a great producer but he had something else that came from a

different place than pure production skill and made him a true star and that was

the fact that he was [ __ ] hilarious you ready we’re cracking them

[Music] how can i even describe stella sessions it was like go into your mates house for your gas to

see on a personal level and your mate is whipping out the first dubs you’ve ever heard and he’s as excited to play them to you

as you are to hear them [Music]

i gotta feel the impact to that truck one more time i definitely had a bit of a para-social friendship thing going on

with scream when i was a teenager i didn’t know him personally i understood that he was just

a dj who played music i liked and yet at the same time he felt like an older brother to me upon reflection i

can see that a lot of behaviors which are hard baked into my personality now as an adult from the slang i use to the sense of

humor i have were probably directly influenced by scream emulating the way he used to talk about stuff and finding

the exact same things funny hey i hate together i hate it like it could be forgotten about i don’t think

anyone really care like there’s a few people annoyed in holland can we have a random applause for

screaming also banger and screams friendship what the [ __ ] that was the most heartwarming

thing i’d ever witnessed as a young dude whose only interest was really bass music in interviews and on radio shows you

could feel this really sincere love that these two guys had for each other’s music and each other meanwhile i was stacking

shelves at iceland every weekend and spending every single pound i earned on dubstep vinyl i also got a cracked copy

of reason from my older sister’s boyfriend specifically so i could start making dubstep music and thus i began what would become

a lifelong hobby of making beats so although i was not in the clubs in the heyday of dubstep

i still very much felt like i was part of the dubstep movement and that the dubstep movement

was a big part of me it was something bigger than a hobby it was the entire foundation of my identity

some teenagers get into sports others play video games my thing was being clinically obsessed

with dubstep in order to understand how things

started going west in the dubstep scene you first have to understand what dubstep actually was and i’m not

talking about the wikipedia definition yeah it was a half step club genre with big bass played around 140 beats per

minute no you have to understand what dubstep really was in the same way that romantic

orchestral music emerged as an emotional response to restrained classicism and rock and roll emerged as a reaction to the anodyne

family-friendly pop music of the post-war period dubstep emerged as a reaction to uk

garage in many ways uk garage was the quintessential late 90s genre

the spirit of the music reflected the unbridled time of optimism that was coursing through the veins of the uk

80s austerity was over young people had more disposable income than they could ever remember having

and everything was just so colorful the culture of uk garage music like

everything else in the late 90s was extravagant as [ __ ] now don’t get me wrong the people going to garage raves were the same as any

other young people they probably had no money and spent everything they owned whiling out at the weekend

but there was something about garage music culture that led to people behaving super extra like people would go to the

rave in a power suit and bust champagne in the middle of the dance floor it was glorious musical escapism a sort of

public spectacle that everyone in the garage scene collaboratively participated in the garage movement brought people from

grey britain into a more colourful and aspirational world and you can see this reflected in

the promo shots the artists rolled out at the time they reflect this off the wall vibrant

lifestyle that the garage movement projected even in the promo shots of so solid crew

the baddest garage mcs who were themselves a repudiation of certain trends in the wider movement

there were these residual symbols of extravagant fashion and ostentatious wealth they were members of the garage

underground but they were also royalty by contrast look at the promo shots of dubstep artists which started

emerging in the 2000s and straight away there’s a lot of different visual information here

first look at the people from the way they dress to the way they hold themselves the way they’re framed in the

shot what’s striking is that they are remarkable only in their unremarkableness

they’re people who you’d pass on the street and not give a moment’s notice to people who are no different in status or

substance to you or me and of course dubstep producers make a conscious choice to frame their press shots in

this way scream’s first lp cover in particular has always struck me as the kind of photo that your mate might snap

of you as a joke when you’re pretty [ __ ] spangled but there’s obviously something in this image of scream being at odds with a

crowded room that communicates a message about his music that he wants to put out there additionally look how much

setting we’re seeing in these photos the surrounding environments of dilapidated streets desolate buildings

and battered walls the framing of the shots means the people are often dwarfed by their own surroundings and again

this is a conscious decision the artists are not just showing us who they are they’re to a much larger extent

showing us the places they live in and this is a great jumping-off point to start talking about

what dubstep was the early pioneers of dubstep splintered away from garage because they were drawn to deeper

darker sounds the movement that eventually formed would replace the kaleidoscopic escapism of the previous

era with a clear transparent magnifying glass through which the greyness

the moodiness and the alienation of modern britain were no longer ignored but reveled in

[Music] sounded grey it sounded cold and isolating

it was an unapologetically intense and brooding genre more prone to make you knock your head back in grimace

than vibe like you would in a party atmosphere in 2004 music journalist martin clark aka

blackdown wrote if grime is the voice of angry urban london dubstep is its primary echo the sound of

dread bass reflecting off decaying walls tune your ear right and you’ll detect the secondary echoes of king tubby’s dub

excursions wiley and jammo cynogram experiments strange b movies metal heads at its peak

zed bias and lp’s dark swing basic channels decay and detroit’s mournful machine funk

but most of all you’ll hear the echoes of modern multicultural london of jamaican african chinese indian

american cockney and even scottish accents reflections come off crumbling warehouses dirty tower blocks

endless road terraces unhinged night bus rides skunked out cars and clattering overland trains

london this is the defining influence on dubstep that which gives its tempered edgy

compressed character these are the echoes of a tense intense city this is mystical margin music this is

london 2004 dubstep was very much a product of its time and place

following the twin towers the london terror attacks and the subsequent retaliatory war in iraq

the atmosphere in britain was far more grim and our cultural output reflected the change we saw an

influx of great films and tv shows which looked at the character of britain through a more critical lens

exploring the emptiness of what ultimately meant to lead a british working life challenging grand narratives about

british society and our institutions and prompting some serious reflection on the underlying soul of the nation

dubstep captured this shift towards gritty realism in music form but what was so deeply resonant

about the genre was its underlying ability to capture beauty in the darkness sound palette of dubstep

was moody and yet the tunes that came out of it often produced these uplifting transcendental moments that sounded all

the more satisfying because they came from a dark and brooding place and if we’re gonna talk about the capacity

of dubstep to find beauty in the gloom we’re gonna have to acknowledge the artist who did that

the best [Music] as soon as burial emerged it was clear

that dubstep had found its virtuoso talent it’s shakespeare it’s banksy the artists that

took the conventions of the medium and did something so special with them that they utterly transcended the genre

burial’s music fundamentally changed the way people thought about dubstep revealing that the mournful echoey

aesthetic of the sound could be channeled into remarkably human songwriting but really more

crucially burial’s music challenged people’s perceptions of what electronic music could be full stop his early albums have not aged

a day since they were released over 10 years ago and still sound like some version of electronic music which has been

intercepted by creatures from another world who’ve tried to replicate dubstep and garage only to come out with a product

which is way too ethereal and otherworldly to fit in with what we have here down on earth

every time i mention burial to someone who knows about his music i’ll see this look pass over their face and i just know that they’ve got bare memories

attached to his stuff my best friend told me that as a teenager he laid down on the floor and cried his eyes out once to the

heart-wrenching vocal that comes in the last 30 seconds of shell of light my girlfriend once remarked to me that she’d had a midnight walk listening to

foster care and it suddenly dawned on her that the fading high-pitched noises embedded in the mix were exactly like the fading lamp lights

she was walking past on the street and in my early twenties i remember a particular new year’s eve where we all danced to homeless on the edge of a hill

overlooking sheffield burials tunes are just so expressive and poignant in so many different ways

that they sound like straight up emotions just being beamed out of your own heart there’s an ongoing discussion about

whether burial’s music can in fact be considered dubstep at all as it so willfully bans tropes of the genre

but i’ve always found that although beryl’s affiliation to the dubstep scene might be whispered in the genre conventions of his music

it’s very clearly articulated in his ethos as an artist here’s what he said in an interview with

mark fisher in 2007 i spend a lot of time wandering around london i always have

sometimes it’s because i’ve got somewhere to go sometimes it’s because i haven’t got anywhere to go so i’d be

wandering endlessly getting in places being on your own listening to headphones is not a million miles away

from being in a club surrounded by people you let it in you’re more open to it

sometimes you get that feeling like a ghost touched your heart like someone walks with you in london

there’s a kind of atmosphere that everyone knows about but if you talk about it it just sort of disappears

it’s about being on a night bus or with your mates walking home across your city on your own late at night or being in a

situation with your girlfriend or boyfriend or coming back from a club or putting tunes on and falling asleep

if you’re well into tunes your life starts to weave around them i’d rather hear a tune about real life

about the uk than some us hip-hop i love r tunes and vocals but i like hearing

things that are true to the uk like german bass and dubstep once you’ve heard that underground music

in your life other stuff just sounds like a [ __ ] advert imported dubstep was a sick

[ __ ] bassy club genre but it also had something else baked into it

there was a feeling surrounding dubstep difficult to put your finger on but nonetheless always present

it felt like the genre had something to say about britain about life here and the way we carve out small moments of peace in largely oppressive

monotonous surroundings and although not every person who listened to dubstep back then would articulate this in quite the same way i

am doing now i can tell you that this feeling of dubstep standing for something bigger

was something we all felt i hope this gives you some idea of the fact that although dubstep was just club music

reducing it down to its genre tropes doesn’t do justice to what it actually represented in mid-2000s britain

it carried a specific contextual meaning that was hard baked into its style and

form to hardcore dubstep fans this meaning was an important part of dubstep’s legacy

something that dubstep needed to honor and this makes what happened next all

the more painful brostep is a term which has been coined

to describe a particular derivative of dubstep which emerged in the early 2010s this style of dubstep

leans towards the use of melodic ibita sounding intros big crisp heavy metal drums and waves

upon waves of distorted modulated bass lines which frantically smashed their way into tracks leading to

a listening experience of absolute chaos the word brostep was originally coined by dj cozzy around

2010 and was subsequently popularized by a spin profile of the movement in 2011.

it’s an inherently pejorative term designed to disparage the people who listen to this type of dubstep as

bros cultureless frat boys who’ve never put in the work that the rest of us did crying for the last 30 seconds of shell

of light by burial the most popular artist of this subgenre and undoubtedly the one who played the biggest role in

bringing it to worldwide acclaim is a producer from los angeles america called sunny john

moore aka skrillex say that skrillex’s music was not well received by the uk

dubstep scene is quite the understatement the uk scene hated skrillex on a deep

emotional level we hated his screechy music we hated his fans we hated the essence of who he was and

what he stood for so much fate could not have conspired to thrust a more infuriating person into

the role of dubstep’s ambassador to the world than former first to last lead singer sonny moore

and he was popular so popular that henceforth whenever dubstep was mentioned in a conversation

skrillex’s music was the default setting of what people thought you meant and that remains true

to this day whatever dubstep was before 2010 the way in which the majority of the world identified the music if they’ve heard of

it at all is via the particular brand of dubstep that skrillex makes when dubstep heads tried to explain how

skrillex was able to become the biggest star of a scene where all the original fans ostensibly hated him they have a tendency of spinning certain

narratives about evil corporate america emerging from nowhere and somehow managing to corrupt the pure

and beautiful spirit of the uk dubstep sound there’s a reason why this narrative is compelling it fits with a preconception that we

already have here in the uk about what happens to art and culture when it passes through the machine of american commercialism like what

happened with films from world cinema and what happened with politics and what famously happened with the

office our british comedy which unflinchingly showed the mediocrity and unfulfillment of working life

which was slowly transformed into a show of wacky american hijinks where all the characters

seem to be inexplicably living their best lives through working at a mid-tier american paper company

why the [ __ ] are they all singing michael in emotional farewell song he’s the most annoying person in the world that’s the whole premise of the

[ __ ] show however the truth is far more complex than commercial america having its

wicked way with our music scene and as will become clear the people who paved the way for skrillex

to become dubstep’s first international superstar are by and large the very same people who most fervently

hate him the first thing to understand is that uk dubstep was never the orthodox movement

that people like to think of it as retrospectively no genre is ever the result of a singular-minded

push towards an agreed destination they happen very organically often accidentally when art points in a

vaguely similar direction the battle to define what the leading tropes of a genre are is one which is always ongoing and even

genre tropes that have long since been taken for granted are prone to being revised if other strands of the music become more popular

if you ask most dubstep heads where the genre started to go downhill many will point you to one cd which was

released in 2007 casper and rusko’s fabric life 37 mix

during the year of its release this was the definitive dubstep mix and took the genre in a new direction which is less

introspective and more lively party oriented you could say at various points it features tunes with

the types of sound design that one can retrospectively look at and find some similarities with the music that

skrillex makes however the shift that took place in the uk dubstep scene was far too endemic to be rationalized

as the result of any one particular thing or person it was something which happened on a far

broader scale if you want to understand the fall of dubstep the time period which is most relevant to look at is 2008 to 2010

an era which i like to call the dubstep nether zone because during this time the sound was being pushed in so many

different directions that it became completely undefined and amorphous as a musical space dubstep had

been going for long enough that producers were ready to drastically challenge its established tropes but whilst there was a shared appetite

for change different producers had very different visions for what form that change should take

i remember when zombies ep dropped on hyperdub and how much that record whipped the rug

out from under my feet if burial’s music revealed the extent to which dubstep could tug on your

heartstrings zombies beats revealed how much dubstep could [ __ ] with your head this ep was and still is one of the most

dark and twisted collections of snes sounding beats i’d ever heard and for two years

zombie just kept going making absolutely [ __ ] tunes sometimes with lasers sometimes

with wobbles sometimes with flutes zombie built this whole landscape of cursed dubstep music that

existed in its own lawless parallel universe and there were other producers who seemed to be landing

on a similar head [ __ ] sci-fi reorientation of the dubstep sound people like iconica who put out this

mind-blowing tune please and becoming real who was channeling surrealism in these gloopy square wave tinged compositions

that were sublimely beautiful and so well and intricately orchestrated then you had another cohort of producers

who were pushing very vocalist-centric tracks artists like von d bella and clouds

whose music has always to me felt like it has this icelandic folky feel to it

vocal tunes had of course always been a feature of dubstep but post 2008 it felt like there was a concerted

effort made to collaborate with vocalists whose ways of singing suited the ethereal hazy quality that the genre had

always had and the results are some of the most intriguing bits of niche pop music you’ll ever hear

meanwhile there were other people taking the doom-filled darkness of the sound to its logical conclusion

shackleton appleblim and peverulis come to mind they mainly channeled the droning ambience of early dubstep beats

and created a powerful sense of dread over rolling drums leading to an intense and immersive sort of soundscape

listening experience and then we had [ __ ] my top boys the hemlock collective who were light years

ahead of their time but still very much anchored to the dubstep scene the early work of untold

in particular is genius deconstructed club music that is so jarring yet unbelievably satisfying to listen to and

my favorite dubstep tune of all time was one which was released on untold’s label at the end of 2009

a wonky mesmerizing soulful record by a then completely unknown 20 year old producer

called james blake and yes that is the james blake who now collaborates with beyonce and plays his

piano music to millions of people all over the world the first bits of art he ever put out

into the world were incredible dubstep tunes he is going to get his own video on my channel one day

i love his early beat so [ __ ] much however if there was one strain of dubstep that you felt you

could point out and put money on at the time and say that right there that’s the future of the sound it would be the music

pioneered by a young bristolian called joker to all intents and purposes joker

had completely different sensibilities as a producer from the ones that had defined the dubstep sound just two years

previous his tracks far from big dark and brooding were glimmering monuments to a colorful and nostalgic past

90s gangster leads tracks which paid homage to 1980s vocoder funk some melodies that sounded like they

came straight out of snes games and others that sounded like the thugged out version of the bladerunner soundtrack

but it was all executed so beautifully that you’d be hard-pressed to find anyone in the scene who wasn’t

immediately enraptured with joker as soon as they heard his beats and it showed in the amount of artists who

subsequently emerged taking inspiration from him we had jemmy making the evil pokemon

trainer version of joker’s music taking the gank to leeds and dropping him into what feels like a long boss

fight sequence guido whose bitter sweet tracks now sound like a uk forerunner to clam’s casino’s early work in my opinion

and ghostmer who’s track thoroughbred is just like i think it’s a destiny’s child sample and these coolest [ __ ] blip melodies

which run up and down all the way through the tune it’s an absolute vibe this type of dubstep which drew its inspiration from 80s era soundtracks and

old school video games coined its own name purple music words which were

immortalized in the title of joker’s biggest rave track purple c and there were so many other producers orbiting the purple

sound who was so talented it was pretty mind-blowing how much creative juice we seem to be getting from this one

niche sub-genre of a genre that was itself just a small corner of the uk electronic music landscape

purple music is the answer i would have given if anyone had asked me what kind of dubstep would blow up and take the

genre to the next level on the world stage in 2010 but over the course of 2009 i slowly

started realizing that the vast majority of new listeners who were flocking to here dubstep in the raves

had not come to hear purple music they were here for something else now we must address the elephant in the

room that i purposefully left out of the discussion until this point whilst there were all these eccentric strains of dubstep popping off between

2008 and 2010 they were pretty much all being collectively overshadowed by another

form of the sound which was not just carving out a space for itself but growing exponentially in popularity

with each passing month and the name that we had for this back in 2008 was dubstep tear out music tear out

tracks were distinguishable for their chaotic energy which they created through hard drums and warping mid-range

bass lines when we say mid-range what we mean is the bass lines were specifically engineered to register highly in the mid

frequencies as opposed to earlier dubstep tracks where the bass lines were typically in the low end frequencies

and i can give you a mini demonstration of how this works so here i have a mid-range bass line in

order to turn it into a low end bass line i’d remove all the high-end frequencies from it like this so

those frequencies no longer come through and listen to how the sound changes as the high frequencies are removed

it suddenly sounds a lot deeper because the low frequencies are the only part of the bass you can hear

and on a track it creates this cavernous meditative vibe which can be very deep and powerful when played on a big sound

system

this is the feeling that a lot of the early dubstep fans enjoyed that pounding weight of the base that

presses into your chest you get this surreal feeling like the beat is inside you like you and everyone around you are

underwater swaying and floating in it and now let me bring the mid-range frequencies back

into this bass line and immediately you can hear how much of a difference that makes the bass line is a much more potent

force in the mix and this drastically changes the character of the tune as a whole it now sounds really disruptive it’s all

up in your ear it feels like a way more rowdy listening experience just from the base taking up more frequency room tear out

dubstep tracks with mid-range bass lines offered a different type of experience in the rave because the fact that the

baselines were so full and fat gave them a dazzling wow factor when they dropped

they telegraphed a clear signal to the crowd the drop is here it’s time to go mad now so tear

out tunes always got these immediate explosive reactions

[Applause]

small but interesting side note there’s a language culture in dubstep and 140 music in general

of telling people to [ __ ] off when you’re vibing to a tune you like i don’t know when this started but i’ve always found it kind of joke to think about an

unsuspecting person landing on a karna neat track and wondering why their fans appear to be telling them to [ __ ] off and shut

up very disrespectful now i can’t stress the following point enough if your only criteria for judging music

is how deep the base is you’re an idiot there’s a time and place for every bass line and there’s nothing

that makes deeper dubstep tracks inherently better than the mid-range ones they just have different functions in

the dance i personally love tear out dubstep tracks when you’ve got a little groove going and squirmy

bass lines popping off over the top it’s a madness it sounds so sick to me i get this instant grin on my face like

yes it’s time to go mad ever since cokie’s tuned spongebob was being dropped in sets in 2007

it was clear that amongst dubstep listeners there was a thirst for these big tear out crowd stopper tunes where

deepness wasn’t a factor writing for pitchfork in 2007 martin clark wrote

a recent dance floor fave in chef and mala sets is a new cokey dub possibly called spongebob for a while

parts of dubstep have been entering into a german-based style harder than thou contest and spongebob certainly holds

its own the harder than valcab often deploy heavy doses of wobbled bass lines a style that koki did as much as anyone to

pioneer and yet this tune takes it to the next level deploying dark aggressive synths

in rapidly fluctuating interval patterns they overload the tune so there’s little space left for other elements

drums etc the result so called an alien does differentiate itself from other

run-of-the-mill dark dubstep beads but the question needs to be asked aesthetically does dubstep

really need to get that hard dark and cold and the dubstep scene replied [ __ ] off black down you nerd cookie’s

beats are sick mate there’s no way this is gonna backfire on the scene a question which might occur to you

particularly if you’re new to dubstep is what separates koki’s beats from the ones that skrillex makes

why was koki’s crazy music embraced by the uk dubstep scene while skrillex’s crazy music was

dismissed as bro step i think that’s a really good question because on the surface of things tear out dubstep and brostep

both do very similar things engineering disruptive mid-range bass lines for chaos in the dance

but i think there are some important distinctions to be made between the two mutations of the dubstep sound which help to explain why they are

differently perceived by old school fans of the dubstep genre you’ll have to forgive me for speaking

extremely subjectively and broadly in this next section firstly there are certain structural

tendencies in dubstep production going back to the early years which tear out dubstep despite having crazy sound

design still tends to closely follow a big thing is finding a groove and letting

that groove sink in over the course of a track tear-out producers drop mad bass lines

but they leave those bass lines to stew for the entirety of the tune the drop

feels crazy but after 16 bars you know exactly where you stand and you’re able to sink into the groove as the track

develops even if it’s a fairly mad sound being played by contrast if you listen to bro step

tunes you’ll quickly realize that the people who make them can’t seem to settle on a single groove for any amount of time

every four bars a new iteration of the baseline comes bursting through the door leaving only the massive kick and snare

holding the tune together which makes it virtually impossible to find a groove that’s why you see bro-step crowds giving up on dancing

entirely and just headbanging to the kicks and the snare hits that’s all the track is giving them to

latch onto the other difference between tear out dubstep and bro step is the trimmings which go around the edges of a track

essentially the intro and outro tear out dubstep again follows the mould of old school dubstep production in striking a tone

which is murky grey the intros are droning ambience or a drumbeat or perhaps the hint of a few

bass notes from the drop i think this makes tear out dubstep beats feel like they exist in the same

aesthetic universe as the old school dubstep classics by contrast bro step tunes strike very bold tones of

fluorescent crimson and deepest darkest black on their way towards a drop brook step

producers have this tendency of saying the quiet part out loud for example instead of creating sci-fi

ambience they’ll have a literal alien who comes in and delivers a monologue like i am an

evil alien and i have a base weapon and i am going to shoot it at you

[Music] and like instead of leaving empty space in the mix so the drop comes with a

surprising impact bro set producers will make the drop a surprise by making the intro

an entirely different song oh a 90’s rave tune are you enjoying that

psych that was merely a genius trick so that you’d be surprised by my bass line

so i guess you could say that whilst the bass line sound design of tear out dubstep differentiated it from the beats

you’d hear in 2006 from people like mala and lofa the structural tendencies and aesthetic

of tear out dubstep situated it very much in the same sonic universe as its predecessor genre by contrast

brostep appropriated the one craziest thing about tear out dubstep with the bassline noises

and proceeded to throw everything else out the window with the result that old school fans could no longer see

any trace of the genre they liked in the beats that bro step producers were making nonetheless it is true that both koki

and skrillex achieved success through experimentation with crazy mid-range bass design albeit on

different respective levels and with different audiences so i think it’s worth exploring what was appealing to people about that

specifically tear out tunes like spongebob by koki enjoyed several advantages over deeper

tunes which had their base low in the mix the first advantage we’ve already talked about tear out tunes were

rave dynamite however another advantage they enjoyed was entirely practical you could hear koki’s bass lines on

any speaker you didn’t need to be a rave you didn’t need to be in a car you

didn’t even need to be wearing headphones you could literally play spongebob out of your laptop and you’re still hearing

that mad growling bass it still sounds crazy if you compare it to tunes like eyes by mala which dubstep

heads typically venerate as being the higher art form of the sound there’s no comparison i sound so

weak on tinny speakers it’s like there’s nothing there and i have heard eyes on a function one sound

system it’s insane you feel like you can see the waves of sound in air it really is an out of body

experience which nothing else even remotely compares to but most people don’t listen to music this way

they have little speakers that come as a package deal with their computers and they are way more likely to be

impressed by something that sounds powerful on these tiny little [ __ ] then something which they are told would

sound incredible if only they had the right equipment to listen to it and it wasn’t just listeners but producers who had limited

access to the studio monitors you would need to engineer bass heavy music it’s no accident that the kinds of

mid-range bass lines which took off in tear out dubstep near the end of the 2000s were very similar to grime music and bassline

genre was pioneered by young producers who suddenly found themselves with access to programs like fruity loops and

reason but didn’t have good speakers to blast their tunes on filling up the whole mix with wonky growling bass lines was a

great way of achieving impact with an audience who would be listening to the tunes in their cars on phones and on laptops but although

tear out dubstep tracks like spongebob by koki were loved by the uk dubstep scene there came a point where opinions began

to shift on the type of dubstep that went hard for the sake of going hard adventure the

reason why the shift happened had little to do with the tracks themselves although they did get more annoying it was more to do with the regularity at

which these tunes were getting played in dubstep sets previously tear out tracks had always

been held in equilibrium by other variations of the dubstep sound the electricity of hearing a tune

by koki in the rave came from the fact that it would explode out of nowhere straddled on either side by tunes which

were not by koki it was the variation the way that dubstep mixes would switch up to something mad and then simmer back down

to more introspective dubstep that made go into the night such an immensely enjoyable wild ride but between 2008 and

2010 the ratio of tear out dubstep to everything else was becoming skewed instead of hearing

three cokey s bangers over the course of a set you’d hear 15 20 sometimes people playing entire

sets composed uniquely of hard tear out tunes as i’ve said i love rowdy beats but do i

want to hear spongebob mixed into don’t mess about mix into the where’s my money remix then rock the bells then a

skeleton then i’ll cut you then serious no it’s like being tortured with an array of slightly different chainsaws

and none of them end up packing the punch which they should because there’s nothing to differentiate them from everything else being played

either side of them in the mix and this is what was happening at the dubstep knights full sets

stacked full of tear out tunes led to a fatiguing experience where the moments of electricity

no longer packed the same punch what i didn’t understand at the time was that there was actually a force

outside of the dj’s control that was having a massive impact on their tune selection

and that force was an anti-smoking law which came into force in summer 2007. we’re now just weeks from the ban

on lighting up in public places but there’s still doubt about exactly which public places will be affected

pubs clubs and bars for instance yes smoking is going to be banned there as a non-smoker my reaction to the

banning of smoking in clubs was one of complete indifference but unbeknownst to me smoking played a

big role in dubstep events people liked being able to come to the rave pick a spot to chill in and blaze

throughout the night experiencing dj sets in this way where you stand in one spot and don’t move

it’s like you’re signing up for the adventure the selector wants to take you on whatever that entails whether it’s weird

deep ambient whatever effectively you end up experiencing music as a journey rather than a roulette wheel which you

hope will throw you some bangers however the smoking ban changed this dynamic

this is what mala had to say about what he observed happening in the scene i think the smoking ban did have an

impact on the sound and the dances for a crew with hard smokers what happens with a smoking ban is that you

have an audience that aren’t focused for the whole session you’re getting people coming in and going out and that was disruptive to the

dancers because it had the effect of shortening people’s attention spans high impact and quick tunes get the

quick response this really cuts to the heart of the issue djs didn’t necessarily want to play sets

of wall-to-wall tear out tracks but many of them saw it as the only way they could actually

keep people in the clubs during their set rally bangers pumped the room up and made people feel that they would miss

out on something if they stepped outside so djs kept playing them people often think of djing as a one-way street where

the dj decides what songs they’re gonna play and the crowd vibes to their selection in reality djing is a lot like

well it’s a lot like having sex you have your own specific tastes and preferences which you want to try out but at the end

of the day your main goal is keeping the audience happy if you’re doing something and they like it keep going why would you stop doing

something that gives them pleasure if you do something that you really like but they’re not into it at all then maybe save those eccentric

techniques for another occasion your ultimate goal here is making sure other people are happy for the duration of your performance

what was happening in dubstep raves was that djs were getting a pretty clear yes signal every time they dropped a tear-out beat

which made the djs less and less inclined to deviate from that winning tactic and the effect

which this dynamic had on the scene was massive it wasn’t lost on young

producers that like 95 of the tracks receiving heavy rotation in the raves were the rowdiest beats of

the sound so logically that’s what everyone started making we quickly went from having just a few

dubstep artists who were known for tear out beats to having a scene which was so full of dirty modulated baseline tunes

that you are hard pressed to find anything else and how do you stand out when everyone is making hard music you have

to be the hardest the harder than thou competition which blackdown had warned about when he first heard spongebob by koki in

2007 was coming true in a way that was far more horrible and tasteless than even

he could ever have imagined as this transformation of dubstep music was taking place the people coming to the raves were also

changing the crowd of people who went to dubstep nights in the early days were a mix of dreads art school students weed smokers and

music nerds and the vibe was everyone experiencing the music in their own headspace so dubstep

knights felt like a refuge away from commercial club culture by 2010 that had massively changed

without going into too much detail it felt like the mainstream club commercialism which dubstep had been a

safe haven from had finally caught up with it it was more exhibitionism guys who uniquely turned up to hit on

girls people taking video for their instagram all kinds of stuff which just makes you feel like you’re in some mainstream

student night but with slightly harder music on the sound system and the new fans had come to hear exactly the type of beats which by

this point i hated with a passion even tear out djs like rusco were left with a bad

taste in their mouths from the kind of crowds coming to the dubstep events roadstep is sort of my fault but now i’m

starting to hate it in a way it’s like i kind of took it there and now everybody else has taken it too far it’s not heavy metal i think again

i’ve been in america if i touring for a long time and even more so they just want it as hard as you can

they’re like let’s go i want you to melt my face off tonight like play the hardest hardest you’ve got

and like it’s not about playing the hardest hardest tracks for an hour and a half it’s like someone’s screaming in your face for an

hour you don’t want that this is why i say that the change which took place in the dubstep scene can’t be whittled down to any particular song

mix cd or artist it was happening in the very dna of dubstep itself with the genre taking

on a whole new fan base and signification as a form of music there came a certain pivotal moment for

me in early 2010 when after walking from room to room at a dubstep night for what felt like

hours hating every minute of it i had to admit to myself that it was over i’d harbored this secret hope that bro

step would prove to be a fad that might pass but it was just getting bigger and although it was just

music the decision to stop going to dubstep nights was heartbreaking for me i still loved dubstep the dubstep nether

zone era had been the best time to be a dubstep listener with so much range and creativity

amongst the producers that it was still difficult for me to fathom how bro step had ended up coming out on top

i’d invested all my time and energy into dubstep i’d made lifelong friends with people through it the realization that i could no longer

be part of a scene that had been my home for the last three years hit me like a ton of bricks i felt like i was being forced to

surrender part of my identity that i would never get back and that really sucked when skrillex

emerged in 2010 the rage which flowed from the uk dubstep scene towards him happened not because he defied some unwritten rules

about what the tropes of dubstep should be but rather because he personified everyone’s worst anxieties of what we

could already see happening all around us the dark underwater dancehall we once all fell in love with had become a

monument to exhibitionism it no longer held up a mirror to the world we lived in it defiantly turned

away in favor of meaningless absurdity and the massive popularity of skrillex was

glowing irrefutable confirmation of the fact that we had lost the dubstep culture war skrillex was the cold bucket of water to

the face that made us realize that the enduring legacy of dubstep would not be the memory of it which we had in our

minds it would be the parts of the scene which we’d all been wishing would go away and we despised skrillex for putting

that last nail in the coffin it was easier to be mad at skrillex than it was to be angry at the ambiguous

sequence of events in our own country which led to music taste changing club dynamics transforming and

producers adapting to the new climate perhaps the saddest and most depressing

truth about what happened with dubstep is that the dubstep music we liked just like every other piece of art was a

specific product of its time and place which was never meant to last forever it’s just that we didn’t realize

it had a lifespan until it was over as usually happens with a bit of time

and perspective those things that once made me feel bitter have given way to stronger feelings of

nostalgia and thankfulness to have been part of something bigger than myself for those formative years of my life

although the dubstep records i listened to between 2007 and 2010 were not consequential for the trajectory the sam

would take as a whole they were very consequential for me as a person making and listening to dubstep

beats was something that encouraged me to share parts of myself with the world through art and i think that impulse has never

really died it’s what makes me upload vids to youtube now i also remember that the surprise of learning that iconica one of my favorite

producers in the scene was actually a woman was the first event in a series which led me to question

some of the teenage boy assumptions i’d had about men and women what kind of art they make which itself

was a catalyst for me starting to think about society in a different way and forming my political beliefs and it

sounds weird to say it but every genre of music i listen to now in 2021 has a pathway which links it

back to my dubstep years hearing flow down on skang led me to roll deep then trim then flirt a d and

the whole of the uk grime scene hearing zombie play with wonky beats led me to seek out artists like flying lotus and consequently la

beats as a sub-genre of hip-hop and the first time i ever heard joanna newsom’s voice was on a bootleg by 16-bit which

then led me onto discovering a whole world of amazing folk music people like sophian stevens

pascal pinon and alice bowman who’ve become the soundtrack to my more recent adult years

no matter how my music taste changes between now and the point where i’m an old man all roads will always lead back to

dubstep for me experiencing music is such a weird thing because the impact it has

on you depends entirely on how it finds you and perhaps more importantly when it finds you

it just so happens that dubstep found me at a time when i was still working out who i wanted to be and so i ended up playing a much bigger

role in shaping my musical tastes and sensibilities than it could have done if i was hearing digital mystics for the

first time today i imagine there’s a genre of music like this out there for everyone one which no matter how much time passes you still

feel this glowing connection to the upset will always be that for me the biggest passion i’ve ever had

the best hobby i’ve ever had but most importantly my musical origin story

[Music]

yes yes are you still here thanks so much for sticking around to the end of my vid i really appreciate it

i want to send out a massive thank you to my patreon gang whose names are whizzing up the screen right now i owe

them a lot of gratitude for allowing me to be in this privileged position where i make vids based on personal whims and get to make

some money off it i don’t take it for granted and i want to shower you all with my sincerest gratitude

if you’re a regular timber video enjoyer consider joining my patreon gang or hey subscribe to my channel and simply like

the vid that’s also something i would offer you my humblest gratitude for certain parts of making this particular

video felt oddly emotional to me i think perhaps it’s because we’re still in lockdown and there’s no raves to go

to so it felt oddly moving seeing these dubstep classics popping off in clubs

full of people enjoying themselves hopefully it won’t be too long before we’ve all had the vaccine and we can get back to that

yeah you know good times awaiting us on the other side of the year i hope everyone is doing well generally

stay safe out there and i will now love you and leave you